A news study out of the University of Arizona found that dogs and two-year-old children are more alike than we think, in regards to social and communication skills.

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Evan MacLean, director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the university, and his team, found that dogs and children have similar patterns in social intelligence, more so than chimps -- humans' closest relatives.

The study looked at how 2-year-olds, dogs, and chimpanzees performed on tests designed to look at cognition functions. While chimps performed well on tests involving physical environment and spatial reasoning, they didn't do as well on tests on cooperative communication skills, such as following the finger of a point.

Dogs and children performed similarly on these tests.

Research and previous studies have found that humans begin to develop social communication skills around 9 months.

"There's been a lot of research showing that you don't really find those same social skills in chimpanzees, but you do find them in dogs, so that suggested something superficially similar between dogs and kids," MacLean said in a statement. "The bigger, deeper question we wanted to explore is if that really is a superficial similarity or if there is a distinct kind of social intelligence that we see in both species.

"What we found is that there's this pattern, where dogs who are good at one of these social things tend to be good at lots of the related social things, and that's the same thing you find in kids, but you don't find it in chimpanzees," he said.

The study's formulated hypothesis is that dogs and humans "may have evolved under similar pressures that favored 'survival of the friendliest,' with benefits and rewards for more cooperative social behavior."

The study also could even have the potential to help understanding human disabilities that cause a lapse in social communication development, such as autism.